Naples 1343: The Unexpected Origins of the Mafia

by Amedeo Feniello, Antony Shugaar (translator)

Genres: History, Italy, Nonfiction, True Crime

336 pages, Hardcover

Published November 26, 2024

About the author

Amedeo Feniello insegna storia medioevale all'Università dell'Aquila. È stato, di recente, Directeur d’études invité presso l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales di Parigi e ha insegnato Storia del Mediterraneo nel Medioevopresso la Northwestern University, con sede a Evanston, Chicago. Autore di numerosi saggi sulla società e l’economia dell’Italia meridionale medievale.

Reviews

[Bill Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bet Amedeo Feniello is a terrific classroom professor with the enthusiasm that illuminates history. You can hear his voice in the words.

He's telling the story of Naples' Medieval growth pains, beginning with a murderous raid in 1343 by men from some of the town's leading families and following threads that run forward and backward in time, that tell the story of the city as it evolves under a shifting constellation of rulers and powermongers, keeping at its core the civic virtues of family and aggressive violence.

Apart from making me want to reread Boccaccio, this book also made me remember the relatively recent nature of Italy as a country and how nothing on any map is ever etched into stone.

[History Today]

‘I was born in the land of the Camorra, in the territory with the most homicides in Europe, where savagery is interwoven with commerce, where nothing has value except what generates power.’ So wrote Roberto Saviano in Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System. Sometimes referred to as ‘Italy’s Salman Rushdie’, Saviano has been living under police protection since the publication of this book in 2006, when he began to receive death threats from the Neapolitan crime syndicate. Although Saviano has unveiled this organisation’s practices through his investigative reporting and a multi-season television series, the Camorra continues to traffic drugs, infiltrate politics, corrupt businesses, extort, torture, maim, and kill.

While Saviano focused on the present dangers of the Camorra, the historian Amedeo Feniello, in his newly translated book, searches for its historical origins. As far as we can tell, Feniello has not been personally threatened by the criminals, but the writing of his book was occasioned by a haunting experience. In 2005, a year before Saviano was forced to go into hiding, the Camorra executed three young men at the gates of the Neapolitan school where Feniello worked as a teacher. A violent gang war erupted in the area. ‘What is the source of all this savagery?’ Feniello wondered.

Naples 1343 aims to establish a ‘bond’ between that event from 2005 and another from 1343. In that year, a Neapolitan galley attacked a Genoese cargo ship travelling from Sicily. The ship’s commander was killed, and its cargo – comprising grains and other foodstuffs intended for the richer north – was seized and so remained in the famine-stricken south. Feniello argues that the crime was instigated by Neapolitan nobles, possibly with the tacit approval of the authorities. He suggests that the event foreshadowed the rise of today’s criminal clans.

Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...

Stefan Bauer is a Lecturer in History at King’s College London. His most recent books are The Invention of Papal History and A Renaissance Reclaimed (both Oxford University Press).

[Lee Foust]

I don't really feel that a star rating is valid for a work of history, that is to say a book without primarily aesthetic pretensions. Even if this was pretty clearly written more for a lay rather than specialist audience. Still.

Anyway, long story short, this is a pretty valid thesis, it seems to me, although the book is neither particularly well written nor well translated. Normally, having broken my balls to learn Italian rather late in life to get going on new languages, when I was nearly 30, I try to avoid reading books written in Italian except in the original. However, a friend handed me this recently and since I'm a scholar/teacher of medieval literature (so very interested in the time period) and a resident of Naples quite interested in my city's history, I accepted the gift and jumped right in.

At first the thesis seemed a bit absurd--to try to date the birth of the Neapolitan camorra back to the 14th century. Still, by the end the author had done a fairly convincing job of describing the political power machinations in the city during the Norman, Swabian, and Angevin eras and convinced me that it was the strength of the city's local leaders and their clan-based overseeing of their neighborhoods and their constant jockeying for position both among themselves and either along with or in opposition to the various kings and curias trying to command them that led to a rather stable and traditional form of power in Naples that neither kings nor democracy could wholly break, only brand illegal and drive underground.

I have to say the author makes ALOT of generalizations and/or assumptions based on his data, which I guess one must do, but, since most of these are about power relations and the political and social construction of power, I feel like your political beliefs will definitely temper how you read these. Although Feniello recounts a personal encounter with the camorra at the book's opening and again at its closing, he never divulges his own political leanings and I was a bit irked as I was second-guessing them throughout. As an anarchist whose entire politics consists of a radical critique of power, I really don't see how you can write about these social constructs without in some sense either critiquing or applauding them. So I'd have preferred a stance taken rather than the attempt to sound/remain neutral and just recount the facts. But then I'm a postmodern novelist well versed in the modernist critique of false objectivity so...

Feniello also meanders in a narrative way rather than organizing his argument in a more standard chronological or topical essay form and is pretty long-winded in general. These are pretty common traits allowed by Italian rhetorical standards, thus I fault him less for these flaws (by English rhetorical standards) than the translator who compounds the situation rather than helping to clean the prose up. Obviously the meandering nature of the book was in the writing (note to author: when you find yourself frequently saying "I'll return to this later" it might be wise to reconsider the order of your material) but I saw so many literal translations of Italian phrases and words that I would have Anglicized or rephrased for clarity, repetitious adjectives that could have been trimmed, etc etc.

[Lauren Avance · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think this might be the worst book I've ever finished. Here's why:
-at least 60% of the sentences were either incomplete or run on
-probably around 30% of the sentences started with "and"
-the whole thing starts out by saying there are basically two super old documents that kind of mention the event this guy says started the Mafia and the documents are only partial and maybe this whole premise is conjecture
-I'm pretty sure this is how the book happened:
Author: here's my book.
Publisher: ok, but for some reason, I want this book to be at least 300 pages. You only gave me 75.
Author: oh, um, no problem. I'll just make it longer!
*author adds bullshit like definitions of words everyone knows, phrases in Italian and then in English, and dumb little comments about how interesting he thinks his research is for the sake of length*

I'm so glad I'm done with it.

[David Corleto-Bales]

A rather fascinating book tracing the birth of the Mafia in Italy to the changing economic and agricultural conditions of Naples in the fourteenth century. After centuries of bountiful harvests and a growing population, agricultural production hit a peak and then was unable to sustain the population, leading to famine and a breakdown of the government. Noble families took matters into their own hands, bypassing the royal governments, and eventually morphed into organized banditry. A bit of a primer for our own times where our society seems to be transforming itself into a dictatorship of the 1%. Sometimes annoying to read because of the shorty, choppy sentences that is more like conversational Italian, (it was translated) than a typical non-fiction narrative.

[Peter Panico · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really hard book to rate because I loved the history and roots of the Mafia the author laid out while at the same time feeling like I was back in college reading for a required history of Post-Middle Ages Naples. No stone is left unturned by this author, he must have done some SERIOUS research.

[Gerard de Bruin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wat een slim (clever) boek. Even doorbijten, vooral door de wat vreemde formuleringen en korte zinnen zonder werkwoord. Van de 12e eeuwse buurt bijeenkomst tot de mafia

[Linda Scroggins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting read albeit challenging. - lesson learned - history repeats itself. People who are hungry and struggling along with a poorly run country behave the same.

[Meghan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did not finish about 3/4 of the way. Would be great for those in the history field.